(Editor's note: This story is one in a regular series of stories published Mondays about the experiences of local veterans of World War II.)

As he watched grainy footage of the death camp flash across the screen of his television, Milton Gilbert began to narrate.

"That building you just saw was the crematorium," said the 89-year-old Jewish man. "I was there."

The tape in the Army veteran's VCR is one he picked up when he went back to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the 1990s. It's one of several about the camp he owns, including one in which he recorded his own commentary over the standard narration.

"When I tell you this is the worst concentration camp, this is why," Gilbert said as graphic images invaded the screen.

The purpose of the Mittelbau-Dora camp was to clandestinely build so-called "Weapons of Retaliation" for the German military. After Allied forces bombed German production buildings, the Nazis decided they needed to find a more secure method of production.

In 1943, the Germans had concentration camp prisoners dig huge tunnels into the mountains of central Germany just north of the town of Nordhausen. Prisoners were kept underground in unstable tunnels for months, working until they either died or became too sick to work and were killed.

"That's us," Gilbert said as American soldiers trudged across the screen toward the camp on April 11, 1945. "We didn't know (what was coming). We didn't have a choice."

Gilbert was part of the 104th Infantry Division, which is officially credited as liberating the camp. The experience came just after his 21st birthday, and capped a year of intense combat that left him somewhat numbed to the horrors of war.

"There's nothing like being in the infantry," said Gilbert, giving one example of the difficult scenes he said he came across on a regular basis.

"One day I came across a soldier impaled on a bayonet while searching for an artillery unit," Gilbert said. "He may have been booby trapped. I didn't disturb him. I knew better."

The son of Jewish Russian immigrants, Gilbert grew up in the Bronx, N.Y., during the Depression.

"I remember seeing a guy, who was a painter, shot dead right in front of me when I was a little kid," he said. "That's how rough it was."

Gilbert enlisted in the Army ROTC program in college. He was eventually sent for training with the 104th Infantry in Colorado, where Gen. Terry Allen, a decorated World War I veteran, trained his division.

"Our expertise was night fighting," Gilbert said, which was Allen's forte. Most of the division's battles were fought between 2 and 6 a.m., he said, which allowed the Americans to catch their enemies by surprise.

Page 2 of 3 - Gilbert, a short, skinny kid who had run track in high school, soon found himself running again.

Not too long after he got to Europe, Gilbert was re-assigned from being a gunner to a "runner."

"They didn't have reliable radios then," Gilbert explained, so runners were used to communicate between foxholes and headquarters.

If a unit got pinned down under fire, Gilbert would often be sent back and forth to relay messages. It was a dangerous job, Gilbert said, with a lot of turnover.

"All you did was make sure you kept moving," he said. "Lots of fun."

Gilbert was hit with shrapnel in the shoe and nicked in the neck, but was never seriously wounded. In addition to running, he also filled in for other men who got hurt – a sort of "utility" man.

At Cologne, Germany, Gilbert was asked to fill in for a forward observer – a soldier who helps coordinate artillery fire on the enemy.

With only a few minutes of "training" from the man who had been injured, Gilbert directed artillery fire on Germans from the inside a church that the Germans were shelling.

"When they would take out one floor I would move to the one below it," said Gilbert. He earned a Bronze Star for his actions that day.

In addition to fighting at Cologne, Gilbert crossed the Rhine and Roer rivers. Earlier in the war, he was assigned to assist the British I Corps in Belgium, which led to one of his more strange encounters.

One day, after being asked to find a British artillery unit to assist during a battle, Gilbert came across them taking a break.

"They had all their weapons stacked, and they were drinking tea," Gilbert said shaking his head. "It was unbelievable."

Gilbert said he ended up performing "myriad" jobs during his time in the service, from laying down spools of communication wire to acting as a liaison at meetings between commanding officers.

After the war, Gilbert married and became an attorney. He settled down in Natick in 1968, where he lived for four decades.

His wife Rachel, who shared the same birthday, died last June. He now lives in Framingham, but is still the oldest member of the Natick Rotary, in which he has been involved for many years.

Though his hearing isn't great and he doesn't move as fast as he used to, Gilbert still remembers a lot about the war, and has frequently studied it over the years.

Gilbert went back to Germany for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, where he visited the former site of the concentration camp his division liberated.

Page 3 of 3 - Gilbert said what's always bothered him is that all the Germans he encountered during the war professed to know nothing of the death camps.

Gilbert had taken six years of German in school, so was often used to interrogate a new prisoner or question German civilians.

"Nobody knew anything," he said with disgust, including townspeople near Mittelbau-Dora.

In an interview with the Morse Library's Natick Veteran's Oral History Project in 2002, Gilbert said the stench coming from the camp would have given it away to anyone living in the area.

"The aroma – unless you've been around that magnitude of human destruction, you just don't know that peculiar smell that permeates everything for miles and miles and miles," he said.

Brad Petrishen can be reached at 508-490-7463 or bpetrishen@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @BPetrishen_MWDN.